Joyland (27 page)

“Are you really —” Kenny stammered beneath Chris’s appraising gaze. “What are you gonna do?” he managed.

Chris shook his head, pumped the pedals hard beneath obstinate blue jeans. Soared ahead.

The cardboard in the windows of Joyland had begun to peel. One day soon they would fall inward, slough off. The masking tape would let go, its tongue suitably sticky with the grit of old paint and sill dust. It would decide it had had enough, lean back, allow its bib-like self to crumple to the empty floor. When the boys pulled their bikes up alongside the old squat, though they had just been there the day before, Chris noticed for the first time that the outside sign had been removed. He wished for a second he had thought to steal it — then the thought was as lost as the sign.

Adam Granger lounged against the back wall of the arcade, his nose in secret consultation with his knees. He straightened up when he heard them, his face pinched white and red.

“Look like you’re about to lose your lunch, Granger,” David said.

Adam used his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His belly was thick and pale, a brown-hair swirl in the centre, like a spiral around his bellybutton. Against the tongue of the Rolling Stones’ mural, even Adam was small — one of those red-and-white mints they gave away in restaurants with the bill.

He pulled back his elbows, forming fists, and shook his head, his whole throat jostling with muscle, the cord along one side of his neck taking the opportunity to introduce itself to the gang of onlookers. His neck issued a preparatory cracking, and his hair flicked back with reinstated confidence. He shrugged his shoulders, bringing them up like they were equal to his head. His blotchiness faded.

“I’ve been waiting to pound this fucker for a long time,” he said.

Chris stared at Adam’s face. Everything in the universe slipped a little bit. Chris glanced at David, then Dean. Kenny’s eyes flicked his way for a second. The boys all paused, perhaps to consider what they did or did not know of Adam.

What they knew didn’t matter. In ten minutes and forty-eight seconds, Adam Granger would be dead. They did not, could not, have any idea of this fact. Even Chris — whose powers of prophecy were quietly developing at enormous speeds — could not guess it. If Chris had had access to his best friend’s brain, were able to can-opener J.P.’s skull from across three blocks and through the maple brick exterior of the Breton house, Chris might have grasped why, at this particular moment, Adam’s neck and restraint appeared to simultaneously crack.

In the bungled cosmos of Grade Nine — yes, even Marc Breton’s was bungled — there lived a girl named Genevieve Cartier. Genevieve had the great luck or misfortune of being assigned Marc Breton as a science partner. Marc’s affections swelled whenever Genevieve was near, embarrassingly so. Each day, hours in advance of third period, he began to defuse them with the precision of a trained agent.

In first period, Marc filled his notebook with the derogatory remarks he might make — but wouldn’t — to Miss Cartier. In second period, Phys. Ed, he exhausted himself in the mind-over-matter mechanics of sport, pouring every ounce of strength into demobilizing his classmates. He devoted half of his lunch hour to cold showers, and the other half to avoiding the older, behemoth versions of himself, sauntering the halls in search of any young Oedipus who might topple them from their positions if not quickly and properly dispatched. By third period, Marc was ready to collapse. Tenderly disabled, he would sprawl across the desk, watch Genevieve through lowered lids, imagine he was sleeping next to her — somewhere, anywhere but in the science room. The routine kept him from speaking to her, from saying what might have, surely would have, been deemed “stupid.” Second semester of Marc’s freshman year passed without incident, with scarcely a breath or sentence between them, save what was absolutely necessary. Their relationship was unspoiled, a series of brushed hands in the exchange of assignment sheets, their language primary — yellow, blue, magenta. The gulf between hypothesis and conclusion filled with silent, point-form observations. Genevieve’s notebook ballooned with smiley faces and green felt-tip exclamation marks. Their careful balance would be broken by the beginning of tenth grade.

There would never be a written history of bush parties. If there were, it might include an adequate mention of the night Genevieve condescended to attend one of the more famous in a series of South Wakefield bush parties, hosted by one Somebody VanderSomething, a sheepish boy whose parents were farmers and who was known more by his plot of land than by his name.

Cartier, Genevieve, b.1966

Related: Male Violence

(jen´e vev´ kAR tya´) Cartier’s role in the historical summer of 1981 was peripheral rather than primary. She made famous this common quote, “Will you do it for a beer?” (see Case, 24, and/or 2-4) Under gigglish command (see female behaviour, stereotypical) of classmate Danielle Desrosiers, Cartier was able to convince Lieutenant Adam Granger to approach civilian Marc Breton, forestall him in his merrymaking, and pose an untranslatable query. In the parlance of the day, “_______ wants to know if you will go out with her,” had its grounding as both a serious question and a joke, depending on the circumstance. Given the general stench of the messenger, and perhaps several crude improvisations by Granger, Breton believed the offer to be false. Without any plan of action, he stood and pushed the guffawing courier (as oral histories dictate) “flat on his ass.” Mutual acts of shame and violence began immediately, issuing in a new period of competition and disregard between the formerly friendly acquaintances. Cartier, by all accounts, left the party immediately following the incident, never to return to the land again. Cohort Desrosiers stayed on to engage in an unrelated act of deflowering (see Cherry, Cracking the Big V, Loss of Innocence, Virginity) inside a decrepit school bus whose reason for being there no one was ever able to explain.

In the grand tussle of memory, neither Adam nor Marc could verbalize exactly what had happened. However minor the rudiments of the dispute, its germination was ensured by alcohol and social standing, growing into long-term avarice, and coming to full blossom on this final thrust of summer, after several years in the making.

Whatever gentleness had lurked in Marc’s heart for the girl named Genevieve, it would never be articulated. His affections manifest themselves only in the clean bruising of Adam’s face and ego. When classes resumed in September, Marc would avoid all references to the incident (or ensuing incidents) between the spigots in the science lab. There, apathy plotted itself into the drab pencil lines of Marc’s new and unusually prim partner. Across the room, Genevieve’s forbidding face would glow in the tremulous blue of the bunsen burner. The continuity of emotion remained — moments of private, personal ascension — but it held in the guts of its silence a glass-plated, magnified swim of resignation. A sad swabbing of cotton balls. A directed stream of light for prismed refraction. The red pendant of a mouse’s stomach on the long grey chain of its entrails. Even J.P. did not know these details, knew only the names that accompanied them: Adam Granger (often), and (once or twice) Genevieve.

Chris knew only instinct, what was conveyed in the briefest of glances or missteps of vocal tone. Adam and Marc were soldiers of similitude. Whatever had begun as Chris’s own agenda had slipped away.

The plan was far simpler than any of them wanted to admit. Chris and Kenny had done away with all unknowns — reduced it to something foolproof and easy.

Mounting their bikes, they whirled over gravel, around the corner, loop-the-loop past the park. The cul-de-sac where the Bretons lived was a pale loose mouth. Running Creek Road straight as a ruler, just there, around the bend, on the other side. Dean and Reuben took up posts on the corner, where they could see all the way down St. Lawrence Street. The other boys fanned out quickly. David and Kenny hid behind the hedges on the left. Adam took shelter to the right. A chancrous rust-smitten van was parked conveniently just beyond the crescent’s lip.

Chris threw his bike on the lawn. His only job was to tell J.P. he was heading over to the school for registration. He shouldn’t do it — he knew he shouldn’t — it would only cause more trouble later. It was too late. The door opened.

“Hey man.”

Chris swallowed. “Ready to go?”

“Good a time as any.”

“Your brother coming with us?” Chris had got it out. His first line.
It sounded good,
he thought.
It did, didn’t it?
He congratulated himself — an inaudible flurry of self-doubt and backslaps.

“Yeah, right.” J.P. scoffed.

“I thought he could drive us. . . .” Chris fumbled from the porch. The words hummed on his lips, burned into an invisible swelling, as if a fist had tried to force them back in.

“He doesn’t get his car ’til tomorrow. Besides, you got your bike right there.” J.P. took off his ball cap and swatted it against his leg.

“Hold on.” J.P. disappeared down the hallway to Marc’s room. Too late, Chris realized that on any other day he would have followed him in.

He stood just inside the doorframe under the flat-line smiles of Mr. and Mrs. Breton. Suspended at eye level, the 16x20 print Windex-shone. A dark wooden frame against the dark wood panel. In it, younger versions of J.P. and Marc stared at Chris with adolescent penny-candy grins. Marc’s hair was unruly as J.P.’s, his scalp not yet sheered mean, his paunch not yet muscle. It had only been six months since he shaved it, and now Chris couldn’t imagine him any other way. Even J.P. seemed alien here. A family-photo fervor had tucked in on itself, snuck into the crimped seam of J.P.’s sweatshirt hood, pulled tight. Empty on his back, its faceless face rumped his shoulders with a red bubble. His neck burst from it, taut and beaming. One hand bulged the pocket below the bright white culprit string. Down the hall, Chris could hear them, their voices through the wall.

It was taking too long. He glanced back over his shoulder, Adam’s bike tires obvious beneath the van.

“Get out of my way, limpdick.” Marc brushed past him, left an arrowed trace of elbow under Chris’s ribs. Marc made his way out of the house, the screen door a swinging pendulum back and forth. J.P. stuck his hand out, stopped it, open. In the next year, in partial response to the next three minutes, J.P. would develop a slouch and a stupid shuffle, begin chain-smoking like Johnny Davis. He’d graduate on his smile, go to university for one week, then drop out. He’d sever remaining relations, move across the country, take a job in a restaurant, eventually manage it. He’d meet a girl in a bar and marry her before he had ever seen her without her makeup. He would wake in the middle of the night to masturbate. He would shovel food into his mouth like it was the only thing worth remembering. By forty he would be fat, his former self unfathomable, the retrograde ghost of a man. J.P. replaced by John Paul, John B., and Mr. B., the manager. He would die a clogged young tragic death. Heart attack. One of his three teenaged children, the girl, would cry. The boys would knot their tongues into their ties.

J.P. gestured for Chris to pass him, Adam’s apple bobbing like an egg. It was so easy to see the way things happened, before they happened. It wasn’t a supernatural power. It just
was.

Chris’s footsteps jolted into his legs as he bounced down the porch steps. He could feel it. He could feel
it.
Behind him, J.P. had already disappeared into the past. The world lay before Chris — a labyrinth of concrete and trees — and figures and objects appeared, which he could move away from or toward. That was
it.
The world had gotten unnaturally flat. Chris moved out into the green patch, his physicality not much more than a white dot following a black dot.

From where Chris stood, already Marc looked smaller. He threw a hairy thigh over the crossbar of his bike in a smooth, easy motion. Coasting down the driveway, every gesture entrenched with strange arrogance, Marc’s shoulders broke out of the long black muscle shirt as he leaned back. Chris grabbed his own bike and launched onto it. The motion quelled the transit already occurring in his guts, as if his body had finally caught up.

Marc’s hand fumbled assward, perhaps to grip the back of the seat as he rode. Shirt hem flapped above relaxed-fits. He instantly tucked it back in place over a hard lump of hairbrush. He neared the mouth of the crescent.
Tick tick tick
of the tire.

Chris rose up on the bike, his ass hovering above the seat as he careened forward, air clotting in his throat like cotton. He couldn’t say whether J.P. followed or not, whether David or Kenny were appropriately stationed, whether Dean and Reuben had abandoned the mission entirely or were currently parked on some distant piece of curb, watching. When Chris looked back, this one moment would —

Tick tick tick.

— rubber wheel its way home without incident, would press the handbrakes before —

Tick tick tick.

— follow-up, would open its mouth and say —

Tick tick tick.

Chris’s throat and head infused with heat. Invisible fingernails on the back of his neck. Marc groped at his back pocket again.

— the thing was oblong and silver and —

Tick tick.